Malva by Hagar Peeters

Abstract

revenge murder as a teen. He’s a young man when he seizes control of a government ministry, a post he’ll hold—and ferociously defend—for decades. His life, which spans most of the twentieth century, is primarily a series of horrible events, most of them orchestrated by Carnero himself. Embroiled in disputes over land, religion, and power, he commits murder, arson, and petty theft. His jacket, Monge writes, was stolen “years ago from the first man he ever stuffed in his iron trunk and left to die.” Loads of novels ask us to sympathize with—or at least try to understand—the criminal mind-set. This one, though, stars a character who appears to be incorrigibly evil. It’s disconcerting to spend a couple hundred pages in the company of such a person, but this isn’t your standard character study. The book’s first sentence announces that Carnero is the personification of “the era in which he lived.” Armed with this clue, a reader can unlock the novel’s allegorical elements. The Arid Sky was originally published in the author’s native Mexico, and it’s no accident that Monge’s protagonist embodies the corruption and predation that, at various times, has plagued his country and many of its neighbors, including the United States. As translated by Thomas Bunstead, Monge’s prose is crisp, and his nonlinear narration creates a heightened sense of unpredictability. Though this is often a dispiriting tale, Monge is contending with universal themes. His depiction of unchecked power is a warning , one that will always be worth heeding. Kevin Canfield New York Hagar Peeters Malva Trans. Vivien Glass. Los Angeles. DoppelHouse Press. 2018. 224 pages. Malva, the debut work of Dutch poetturned -novelist Hagar Peeters, had my commitment by page 6; for serious students of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his contemporaries , the courtship may be even briefer . Narrated by Neruda’s all-but-forgotten daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad, the book is as lush with speculative literary history as it is with lyrical prose, picking its way through the sticky webs of family dynamics and revolutionary politics with a focus on neglected figures that aims to outpace the accounts of “prejudiced biographers.” Malva was born in 1934 to Neruda and his first wife, Marietje Hagenaar, with hydrocephalus, a then-untreatable condition that contributed to an early death at the age of eight. Though Neruda’s only child, she makes just a single fleeting appearance in his poetry. In this novel, Malva appeals to Peeters from an omniscient afterlife where she keeps the company of other “disabled” children hidden by their literary fathers while they were still alive (Daniel Miller and Lucia Joyce make an appearance). As Malva reclaims her father’s pen to tell her story of abandonment, the novel probes the question of how to make sense of Neruda’s political outspokenness in light of his silence on the subject of his own mute daughter, Anjum Zamarud Habib Prisoner No. 100: An Account of My Days and Nights in an Indian Prison Trans. Sahba Husain Zubaan Books A moving documentation by a Kashmiri activist, this book tells the true account of one woman’s time in an Indian prison after being arrested circumstantially under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Part journal and part manifesto, the honest and emotionally resonant writing will move anyone interested in the plight of those imprisoned as well as their families, and Habib paints a realistic picture of state politics today. Nicolai Houm The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland Trans. Anna Paterson Tin House Books This short novel is the first appearance in English of one of Norway’s younger but most gifted authors. In The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland, Nicolai Houm turns the trope of a writer in search of a subject on its head by showing Jane’s tragedies in flashback, elaborating eloquently on her grieving process as she ill-fatedly stumbles through the Dovrefjell mountain range attempting to rediscover inspiration and closure. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 75 revisiting his poetry to find where Malva might fit among all the omissions. Malva is as much a triumphant meditation on disability as it is a fiercely...